LEONA HELMSLEY, 87: The self-styled hotel queen whose prison term for income tax evasion and fraud was greeted with uncommon approval by a public who regarded her as a 1980s symbol of arrogance and greed died Monday at her home in Greenwich, Conn. The cause was heart failure, her longtime spokesman, Howard J. Rubenstein, said. Mrs. Helmsley came to public attention after her marriage in 1972 to one of New York's pre-eminent real estate investors and brokers, Harry B. Helmsley, who had divorced his wife of 33 years to marry her. In his heyday, Harry Helmsley controlled real estate worth $5 billion, including the Empire State Building, the Helmsley Building on Park Avenue and the Flatiron Building. He died in 1997. Mrs. Helmsley's real power began to develop in 1980, with her appointment as president of the Helmsley hotels. At the time, the chain ran 30 hotels around the country, including the Park Lane and the St. Moritz in New York, the Harley (now the Helmsley Hotel New York) and the flagship Helmsley Palace. “It was Harry's idea,” she said at the time. She added, “He said the best thing about it was that the board of directors meeting was over when we got out of bed.” Although hotel employees throughout the Helmsley empire were aware of Leona Helmsley's hair-trigger temper and arranged a warning system when she left her apartment on the way to one of the hotels, it was not until she was featured in glossy ads for the hotels that she became a household name. The first ads, for the Harley, showed a smiling Mrs. Helmsley proclaiming that she wouldn't settle for things like skimpy towels, and “why should you?” Occupancy increased to 87 percent from 25 percent, according to the agency that created the campaign. The Harley success led to ads for the Helmsley Palace. Mrs. Helmsley, in evening dress in various settings in the hotel, proclaimed, “It's the only palace in the world where the queen stands guard.” But despite a record of philanthropy, Mrs. Helmsley was so reviled by the public that many cheered when she was convicted in 1989 of evading $4 million in taxes. And after she fired a hotel manager because he was gay, she was forced to endure a humiliating trial, where she was branded a bigot and ordered to pay $554,000. In 2007, Forbes magazine ranked her as the 369th richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of $2.5 billion.

GRACE PALEY, 84: An American writer who achieved literary renown as a master of the short story and created a small but influential body of work that illuminated the frustrations and joys of women's lives died Wednesday at her home in Thetford, Vt. She had breast cancer. Ms. Paley published only several dozen short stories and a few collections of poetry and essays, but the quality of her work attracted superlatives from the country's brightest literary figures. Novelist Philip Roth praised her for an “understanding of loneliness, lust, selfishness and fatigue that is splendidly comic and unladylike.” Writer Susan Sontag called her “a rare kind of writer, a natural with a voice like no one else's: funny, sad, lean, modest, energetic, acute.” Ms. Paley began writing professionally in the mid-1950s. She was often regarded as a feminist writer because her stories brought early and rare insight into how urban women struggle with emotional and physical vulnerabilities; demanding children and lovers; and absent, often misogynistic husbands. She found the feminist label confining, yet she gave credit to the movement for elevating her stature. “Every woman writing in these years has had to swim in the feminist wave,” she wrote. “No matter what she thinks of it, even if she bravely swims against it, she has been supported by it – the buoyancy, the noise, the saltiness.” Her earliest stories were rich in humor and irony. In “The Loudest Voice,” a Jewish child's vocal stamina makes her the ideal narrator of a school Christmas play. Ms. Paley gradually gave way to grimmer themes, including rape and mental illness. She also ventured into character studies less driven by plot. She tended to draw more mixed reviews for the later work. Still, Robert R. Harris, an editor for The New York Times Book Review, once noted that Ms. Paley's literary reputation remained largely untarnished because “her best stories have staying power, and a few can justifiably be called brilliant.” As a young mother, Ms. Paley drifted away from writing for more than a decade and became involved in community activism in Greenwich Village. During the Vietnam War, she encouraged young men to avoid military service, participated in rallies against the war and in 1969 went to Hanoi as part of a U.S. delegation to bring home prisoners of war. A New Yorker, she also maintained a second home in Vermont, where she protested the war in Iraq in a low-key manner she once described as “vigiling on the common.”

BUTCH VAN BREDA KOLFF, 84: A happy-go-lucky nonconformist who from 1951 through 1994 coached more than 1,300 college, professional and high school basketball games, died Wednesday in Spokane, Wash. His daughter Kristina van Breda Kolff announced his death. Since 1986, Mr. van Breda Kolff had been treated for an irregular heartbeat. He used to say that except for a chosen few, coaching basketball was a vagabond profession, and he was a prime example. He held 13 head coaching jobs, and for one season, at age 61, he coached a high school team. He coached Bill Bradley as a collegian, and Wilt Chamberlain as a pro, and was never fully satisfied with either legendary player. When Bradley played for him at Princeton, he said, “Bill is not hungry.” He said he felt the same way about Chamberlain, who played for him with the Los Angeles Lakers. In the fourth quarter of the seventh and deciding game of the NBA's 1969 championship series, Chamberlain benched himself with what Mr. van Breda Kolff considered a minor knee injury. When Chamberlain asked to return to the game in the final minutes, Mr. van Breda Kolff refused, and the Lakers lost to the Boston Celtics by 2 points. “We played better when he was out,” Mr. van Breda Kolff said. “I have no regrets, because in my mind at the time, I thought it was the right thing to do. The only regret I'll have would be if I don't have a team.” His coaching style never changed. When he was 71 and coaching his final season, The New York Times described him as the “animated, nonstop-gesticulating, chair-kicking, sideline-pacing, expletive-spewing Butch of days gone by.” But his teams were well-schooled, emphasizing teamwork, a patient offense and a tough defense.

WILLIAM “WILD BILL” HAGY, 68: A self-appointed Baltimore Orioles fan who ruled Section 34 in the upper deck at the old Memorial Stadium died Monday. Mr. Hagy was found unresponsive in his home by his roommate, the Orioles said. Efforts by paramedics to revive him failed. Wearing a straw hat and a scraggly beard, Mr. Hagy led cheers at the Orioles' old stadium during the 1970s and 1980s. He spelled out O-R-I-O-L-E-S with his body while fans yelled each letter in unison. “He was part of a great era,” Orioles Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer said. “If you recall, we didn't draw many people back then. Best team in baseball, and we were drawing 1.2 million (per season). He made it exciting to come to the ballpark.” A cabdriver during the day, Mr. Hagy guzzled many a beer in the stands while the fans eagerly waited for him to wave his hands over his head to start his trademark cheer. During important games, the team allowed him to climb on top of the Orioles dugout to rally the crowd with his act. “It was nice to have an unofficial, official cheerleader,” Palmer said.